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Children Quotes

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Children Quotes

“I believe it would be much better for everyone if children were given their start in education at home. No one understands a child as well as his mother, and children are so different that they need individual training and study. A teacher with a roomful of pupils cannot do this. At home, too, they are in their mothers care. She can keep them from learning immoral things from other children.”

“If you try to impose a rigid discipline while teaching a child or a chimp you are working against the boundless curiosity and need for relaxed play that make learning possible in the first place... learning cannot be controlled; it is out of control by design. Learning emerges spontaneously, it proceeds in an individualistic and unpredictable way, and it achieves its goal in its own good time. Once triggered, learning will not stop--unless it is hijacked by conditioning.”

“I don't care how happily married you are or how deeply enmeshed you are with your children and family and career -- every woman needs a couple of chicks who'll break out the sangria just because you need to vent.”

“Delirious as it can be, sex is only one kind of intimacy, and yet has become the cultural catchment area for all kinds of needs because our understanding of intimacy is so poor. Brutal work schedules, related geographic isolation, and the concomitant fracturing of families has meant that there is little time for intimacy, and even less to teach the necessary skills. But intimacy, the axis of romance, is slow, based on the sharing of a life rather than show. In terms of intimacy, folding laundry together or sharing the feeding of a child can have more impact than the most extravagant bouquet.”

“Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.”

“What really does work to increase the feeling of having a home and its comforts is housekeeping. Housekeeping creates cleanliness, order, regularity, beauty, the conditions for health and safety, and a good place to do and feel all the things you wish and need to do and feel in your home. Whether you live alone or with a spouse, parents, and ten children, it is your housekeeping that makes your home alive, that turns it into a small society in its own right, a vital place with its own ways and rhythms, the place where you can be more yourself than you can be anywhere else.”

“I’m washed, I’m forgiven, I’m whole, and I’m healed. I’m cleansed and I’m glory bound. I am only a sojourner on the earth. I am but a pilgrim on this planet, on my way to perfection, and I don’t need anybody to tell me who I am, because I know who I am. I am a child of the King, a son (or daughter) of God, born again through Jesus Christ, bought with the price of His blood. I am a new creation, totally new, thoroughly loved and completely accepted as a child of my Father, precious in His sight.”

“There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end.”

“How do we teach a child our own, or those in a classroom to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have or need answers.”

“I don't want to name names because I don't want to draw too many direct comparisons but the history of Fascism is populated by people who need to subjugate other people and elevate their status and power to a level which is supreme. Usually, any psychological study of those people will reveal a sort of lost, damaged child, who is somehow heartbroken and doesn't have any self-worth.”

“Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?) Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep versed in books and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge, As children gathering pebbles on the shore.”

“True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks , one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller , usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius?”

“Twenty-one years ago, when I first heard Mia Farrow had accused me of child molestation, I found the idea so ludicrous I didn't give it a second thought. We were involved in a terribly acrimonious breakup, with great enmity between us and a custody battle slowly gathering energy. The self-serving transparency of her malevolence seemed so obvious I didn't even hire a lawyer to defend myself. It was my show business attorney who told me she was bringing the accusation to the police and I would need a criminal lawyer.”

“To each his own. It's one of those things. How you build your family—you have to know what you're capable of handling and how your children will relate to each other. Maybe if you have one child and that child has a lot of needs, you realize you cannot give more attention to another. Sometimes you just know as a parent. We felt we could handle more children, and we have a very happy, very full home.”

“The money men make from their willingness to work the least desirable hours is not a sign of discrimination against women, but a sign of the willingness of mostly married men to lose sleep to support the family as their wife loses sleep to feed the child. A willingness to do the uncomfortable shifts is one reason married men earn more than twice what never-married men earn. Men's contribution, made at night, need not be lost in the dark.”

“We need to take responsibility for the effect of our environment on our nervous systems, and particularly the nervous systems of our children. No wonder so many of them are diagnosed with all the stuff they're diagnosed with today. Modern technology is a blessing to be sure, but it's also a curse if we allow it to pull us out of our spiritual center. A 24 hour electronic onslaught comes at the expense of our deep humanity and our deepest relationships.”